Service integration: A soft spot in the SOA testing stack

The concepts of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) have manifested themselves as the next evolutionary step for software development and the industry is fast in adopting SOA. The gained freedom of combining loosely coupled services is countered by resulting challenges for testing. While current research is mainly focusing on the investigation of advanced SOA feature like semantic service retrieval and dynamic binding, industrial projects still face fundamental problems in assuring software quality of SOA applications. In this paper we describe the SOA testing stack and the different objectives of its layers. We further explain why traditional and currently discussed testing techniques alone are not sufficient to cover all relevant testing layers. The unique SOA challenges posed by message based communication are usually not considered in research and industry. Therefore we discuss them in more detail and give advice of how to address them in a holistic development process.